I’ve been automating washing machines, dishwashers, lights, cars, Xmas trees and hot tubs for years. Even had a Hue bulb on the OG Octopus plushie to show the FamilyW when prices were tolerable.
I used to heavily use HA with Ohme & Intelligent Octopus to deliver off-peak slots during peak times with a clever car-charging-but-will-never-reach-the-target automation.
Recently I’ve been trying to get away from HA and pull as much as I can into Google Home to make it more ‘family friendly’ but the main sticking point is getting the Octopus current price into Google Home, to allow some far-fetched automations to actually work.
HA’s default skins and interface need a bit of work to make it easier to use. People see the overview and think nah its not for me but I have managed to make a single pane approach that the other half can use until I change it
Finding it a little frustrating how many bugs and breaking changes there are at the moment in Home Assistant.
I’ve just been hit by the music-assistant bug in HACS. I’ve never had music assistant installed, but for some reason it completely stopped any HACS-dependent addons from working properly.
I’m also aware that there’s a Z2M update pending that has a load of breaking changes too. I haven’t had the chance to look into it yet, but I luckily spotted a thread on it on Reddit before starting the update.
Would love for Home Assistant to be a set and forget sort of thing, but there’s always a bug somewhere that needs attention or another automation that needs tweaking etc.
The most recent nail in the HA coffin was when the GPIO integration was updated and killed existing automations, resulting in a RPi fan squealing at full speed overnight for no reason. While we had temporary guests sleeping in the same room…
I accept there’ll be a level of ‘maintenance’ for the HA ecosystem (aka: anything can break at anytime and you have to fix it) - but the familyW won’t deal with this, hence my current drive to get away from the custom ecosystem into a more mainstream solution. But that doesn’t yet deliver.
I’ve unsurprisingly found that reverting to using individual dedicated apps for individual dedicated hardware/services is a level of pain (number of apps/accounts) - but they tend to just work.
So with the HACS thing, I’m not even on a 2025 version of Home Assistant yet, the issue just randomly showed up after my system’s weekly reboot and nuked half my UI.
This is the thing right, the quality of life improvement having Home Assistant running and working is huge, but every now and again you want to turn on a light or something and computer says no.
type: custom:mini-graph-card
entities:
- entity: sensor.gas_price_today
aggregate_func: null
name: Today
- entity: sensor.gas_12mf_octopus
aggregate_func: null
name: Baseline
color: grey
show_fill: false
name: Gas
hours_to_show: 672
group_by: date
show:
graph: line
labels: true
bar_spacing: 2
decimals: 2
smoothing: false
height: 500
upper_bound: 11.5
lower_bound: 2.8
color_thresholds:
- value: 5.75
color: red
- value: 5.75
color: green
color_thresholds_transition: hard
sensor.elec_price_today and sensor.gas_12mf_octopus are simple template helpers using {{ xx.xx }} in the template, replace xx.xx with the baseline value you want.
Does anybody use Tailscale to make their network externally accessible?
I use it successfully with my NAS, but I have home assistant running on my NAS which I can’t seem to access with Tailscale.
I have a domain, which I have the DNS records configured to the Tailscale IPs. Obviously a device can only access them if it’s within my Tailscale network. I don’t know if it’s because the HA installation is supervised, running on a VM on my Synology NAS.
Use a device on your home network as an exit node then try and access it
If this works add a subnet on that device to open up the ip addresses so accessible when connected to Tailscale outside the home.
If the Nas is directly on Tailscale that I think is different.
This is what it looks like when done correctly. You need to understand the range of you internal ips so do the subnet properly without affecting external ips.
I’m having issues logging into Tailscale directly from HA, so I had to use a subnet to access it. I didn’t really understand how that works… so I’ve learned something!
Most of my tech is basically the same as a year ago.
Doubled the home battery capacity to 20kWh.
Making more use of smart led strips in most rooms that illuminate a little when you enter so you don’t need to turn lights on when briefly entering a room.
Using a Dyson Pure Hot+Cold to use off peak energy at night to keep the downstairs above 18C at night and help stave off using any gas heating as far into the year as possible
Have a heat pump installation on hold until the Welsh Gov planning regs change to allow installation within 3 meters of a boundary without planning permission (should change by end of the year)
I’ve now set up Home Assistant to offset both our energy costs and our carbon footprint.
It works out when it’s viable to export from the home battery to bring our net cost to zero, and then looks for opportunities to offset carbon too by watching the grid’s carbon intensity.
The key part is that it doesn’t just export whenever it could; it checks whether doing so makes sense given the current battery state, the carbon intensity, and how long the export would need to run for. The aim is to avoid running the battery flat before the cheap rate ends.
It all runs automatically: it keeps checking conditions, notifies me when it’s a good window, and then runs the export for the right length of time to offset cost (and carbon, if possible).
Here are some examples of the reports it generates:
These tell me how much I’ve used, and how much battery it would take to net out that use (taking into account the maximum possible rate of export given the current house load). And ends with confirmation of whether its advisable to do so or not.
